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Viewing entries tagged
Disabled Community
Inspiration porn objectifies people with disabilities. I’m all for celebrating the accomplishments of disabled people just like I’m all in on celebrating the accomplishments of non-disabled people. But that’s the thing – the accomplishment itself is what should be celebrated, not the fact that even a person with a disability can make it happen. And the message given either overtly or subliminally to able-bodied people to just try harder really just uses disabled people as a tool.
It’s not a bad thing. It is simply part of who I am. I have been blind for the last 28 years of my life and visually impaired for 28 years before that. I have also been-in no particular order of priority-- a Jewish woman, a life coach, a Zionist, wife, mother, grandmother, aunt, friend, daughter, sister, disability advocate and community leader. My son accepts all these aspects of my identity as well as my blindness because that is all he has ever known. He doesn’t think of my disability any more than my being his mom, being Jewish or any other of my identities.
The swift punch-in-the-gut of COVID-19 has hurled our wellbeing into a state of confusion, dilemma, and reflections. No longer do we wake up early to prepare for work, but change our top and plug the laptop’s charger to conduct remote working in the kitchen. Although it seems impossible, we have found ourselves more online to replace the in-person interaction at work, school, and personal lives. Besides such a leap of change, the news has flowed in with stories about death of loved ones, despair in isolation, and desperation for breakthroughs in news and research. While the gloom hovers in the air of the everyday living, a shift in narrative pervades.
Words matter. I’ve been hearing that phrase a lot lately in the context of today’s social climate, referring to race, religion, ethnicity--any aspect of human interaction. It is true. It’s true because words have power--they can make us cringe when they are ugly and demeaning. They can uplift us when they are empowering and kind. As citizens of the world, when we become educated about issues that affect others and ourselves, our choice of language evolves as does our social consciousness.
There is a problem. An epidemic, a sickness fragmenting our societies very fiber and woefully little is being done to eradicate it. This debilitating problem, plague to sanity, endangers over a third of the world’s population; the end is not nigh. I’m of course talking about the disease of the designers.
